A Capacity, Not a Calling

On Gal Beckerman’s How to Be a Dissident.

We tend to imagine the dissident as a particular kind of person, one who’s born unafraid, temperamentally a rebel, built from some sterner material than the rest of us. It’s a comforting story, and it’s comforting in a way that quietly lets us off the hook. If dissidents are simply made differently, then their courage is admirable but not instructive. We can applaud it, but we are excused from it.

The great gift of Gal Beckerman’s How to Be a Dissident is that it dismantles that story, gently and completely. Beckerman - a staff writer at The Atlantic who has spent a career studying how change actually begins - went looking for what dissidents across history and around the globe have in common. What he found is not a personality type. It’s a set of practices. Dissidence, in his telling, is not a calling reserved for the few. It’s a human capacity, and capacities can be cultivated.

The book is organized as ten imperatives - among them Be Pessimistic, Be Funny, Be Reckless, and Be Immortal - and under each, Beckerman gathers figures who could not seem more unlike one another: Socrates and Ai Weiwei, thinkers like Hannah Arendt and Iris Murdoch, the famous and the nearly forgotten. It is part intellectual history, part biography, part field manual. Its through-line is a journey every reader can recognize: the solitary moment of seeing a truth clearly, the frightening decision to say it out loud, and the long question of what that act leaves behind.

Some of the imperatives are bracing precisely because they cut against what we expect. Be Pessimistic, as I read it, is no counsel of despair - it’s the insistence that the dissident does not need optimism’s permission to act. You don’t have to believe you’ll win in order to refuse to comply. Be Funny recovers humor as a serious instrument, the thing that punctures the false solemnity on which authoritarian power depends. These are not slogans. They are, genuinely, instructions.

But the book’s most empowering move is subtler than any single chapter. It’s Beckerman’s steady attention to the fact that most of the people in these pages were, for most of their lives, conformists. They were not waiting for the barricades. They held jobs, kept their heads down, made the small daily accommodations everyone makes. And then something - a death, a lie too large to swallow, a knock on a neighbor’s door - moved them across a line they hadn’t planned to cross. Dissidence, Beckerman shows, usually begins not with heroism but with a refusal: a single moment when a person decides that they will not, this time, betray what they know to be true.

That reframing matters, because it relocates courage. Courage is no longer the possession of the extraordinary. It’s a decision available, in principle, to anyone, including the version of each of us who has spent years being reasonable, being careful, being quiet.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the book’s account of the Madres de Plaza de Mayo - the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo - and it is, for me, the heart of the book.

They weren’t activists. They were ordinary Argentine women whose children had been “disappeared” by the military junta in the late 1970s - seized, tortured, killed, and erased, while a terrified country was instructed to notice nothing. Public assembly was forbidden. So the mothers did something almost absurdly modest: they went to the plaza in front of the presidential palace, and because the police told them they couldn’t stand still there, they walked. They walked in a slow circle, week after week, wearing white headscarves made from their children’s cloth diapers, some embroidered with a missing child’s name.

That was the whole of it, at first - a handful of women walking in a circle. It looked like nothing. It was, in fact, one of the bravest acts in the modern history of the hemisphere. The junta could disappear individuals in the dark; it could not so easily explain away mothers grieving in broad daylight, in the most public square in the country, refusing to leave. The Madres made the regime’s central lie - that nothing was happening - impossible to sustain. Their persistence drew the eyes of the world. And their small circling walk became one of the moral forces that stripped the dictatorship of its legitimacy and, in time, helped bring it down.

The mothers paid for it. Some of the Madres were themselves disappeared, including one of the women who founded them. Beckerman doesn’t soften that. But the lesson he draws is the one this moment most needs to hear: the walk worked. The simplest, most repeatable act of public refusal, performed by people with no power and no plan, became a movement that outlasted the men with all the guns.

If I have a criticism, offered in friendship to a book I admire, it is this. How to Be a Dissident is magnificent on the individual’s journey to the threshold of refusal, and somewhat thinner on what happens once the threshold is crossed. Beckerman is, by his own framing, writing about conscience - the inner voice, the personal act. But a dictatorship is not brought down by an aggregate of brave individuals each refusing alone. It falls when those refusals become organized, sustained, and collective.

And here the Madres themselves gently correct the book that celebrates them. Their power was not only moral courage, though it was certainly that. It was also infrastructure. They found one another. They built a practice - the same plaza, the same day, the same circle - that others could see, and join, and repeat. They turned private grief into a public and durable thing. The leap from the lone dissident to the movement is the leap that determines whether authoritarianism actually falls, and it is a leap of organization as much as of conscience. Beckerman gets us, brilliantly, to the edge of that leap. The crossing is work he mostly leaves to us.

I don’t hold it against the book. A book that tried to do everything would do nothing well. But a reader should know that How to Be a Dissident is the beginning of the syllabus, not the whole of it.

Still, and this is what I most want to say, read this book, and read it now. We’re living through a season engineered to make people feel small: to make conscience feel naive, refusal feel futile, and the safe move always the quiet one. Beckerman’s answer to all of that is patient and devastating. The dissident is not a different kind of human being. The dissident is an ordinary person who, at some specific and frightening moment, decided not to betray what they knew.

That moment is not reserved for the heroic. It’s not behind us, in history, or above us, in greatness. It stands in front of nearly every one of us, and probably sooner than we would like. How to Be a Dissident will not make the moment easier. What it will do - and this is no small thing - is make sure that when the moment arrives, you recognize it, and you remember that ordinary people, walking in a circle, have faced down far worse and won.